If slithery, slippery things aren’t your bag, you should spend some time with our Learning Officer, Kerry Fieldhouse. And if that time happens to be around six in the morning, all the better. Because at that unearthly hour of the day she, along with her insomniac band of volunteers, is likely to be found fishing around in search of newts - an experience that's sure to make you feel all warm and gooey about things that 'gyre and gimble in the wabe'
On several days between April and June, Kerry undertakes a count of the species found in our ‘old’ pond. Last year, she discovered very little as the pond was more like a bog, mudbound and clogged with weeds. However, welly-clad volunteers helped dig out some of unwanted plantlife earlier in the year so the team was hopeful of finding newts this time round.
So here we were on a grey, nippy, grizzly May-but more-like-November morning ready for the off.
The newts swim into traps made by upcycling plastic drinks bottles and securing them in place with a bamboo cane topped by a tiny flag. Eight of them were put in the pond by torchlight the night before. Hauling them out is a bit like watching someone draw a raffle – you’re hoping like mad that you’ve got a winning ticket. Fortunately, the first bottle out produced a prize – a female smooth newt along with a great diving beetle. The second and third also contained smooth newts – after that we got nowt rather than newts. But it was a good result.
Anything Kerry finds, she records and sends the information to the Biological Records Centre as well as the National Amphibian and Reptile Recording Scheme. Kerry also works closely with the Freshwater Ponds and Habitat Trust, an organisation that recently conducted DNA testing on the pond water for great crested newts, a species that’s been around for 40 million years but since the 1970s has seen numbers fall dramatically. Water quality was also checked and the news was good in both instances – DNA was found and the water tested healthy.
And sure enough, a dip of a net in the ‘new’ pond brought a female great crested new to light. ‘Can you see her tiny feet – they look as they’ve been painted’, enthused Kerry. And they did. And if Max Factor were alerted to this fact, Amphibian Orange would be seen on the toes of fashionistas everywhere this summer. ‘We’re so lucky to have a European Protected Species on the reserve’, she added.
Kerry and her team will return for another count later this month:
‘Ponds are vital for wildlife in many ways. But over the past 100 years it’s estimated that we’ve lost 1 million ponds in this country. The reasons vary, from pollution to infilling to just silting up due to lack of maintenance. But the results are always the same – a reduction in wildlife habitat which ultimately means less wildlife. So it’s important we keep this pond, and its inhabitants, alive and kicking for as long as possible’.